George H.W. Bush at 100: The last WASP president

Today marks the centenary of the birth of George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president of the United States. With one exception — his eldest son in 2004 — he is the last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote.

He was a remarkable man in many ways, having been decorated as a U.S. Navy pilot during World War II, and his resume before the presidency was broad. After becoming a successful oil executive, he was a two-term congressman, unsuccessful candidate for the Senate, ambassador to the United Nations and to China, chairman of the Republican National Committee and director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bush seems now a figure of a truly bygone age. He was a relatively low-key vice president to Ronald Reagan by choice rather than imposition, learning from his Democratic predecessor Walter Mondale that being effective as VP in Washington owed a lot to avoiding conflict with White House staff and cabinet secretaries. He was also aware that the previous Republican vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, had become mired in disputes with other members of the administration by trying to insert himself into the decision-making process.

Because he succeeded the man who was then the oldest president in history, it is easy to forget that George H.W. Bush turned 65 the summer after his inauguration. He had come of age politically in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” radically shifted its geographical and ideological center of gravity.

In 1948, the first presidential election in which Bush was able to vote, the GOP carried 16 states, none of them further south than Kansas. Four southern states went to Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, while the rest were solidly Democratic. When Bush himself won the presidency in 1988, he swept the South. His opponent, Michael Dukakis, could win no further beyond the Mason-Dixon Line than West Virginia.

Bush’s background reeked of the old GOP. He was the second son of Wall Street banker Prescott Bush, later senator from Connecticut, and Dorothy Walker, daughter of the president of the impeccable white-shoe investment house W.A. Harriman & Co. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, he was educated at Phillips Academy, one of the oldest high schools in America, and after wartime service took an accelerated degree in economics at Yale.

As an undergraduate, Bush captained the baseball team and was a member of the Skull and Bones “secret society.” His predecessors in the club were a roll-call of the Yankee elite: Morrison Waite, William Taft, Benjamin Brewster, Ashley Day Leavitt, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Henry Luce. Inevitably, he was a conscientious member of the Episcopal Church, like three-quarters of the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and he later spoke of how his faith had sustained him when he was shot down during the war, and when his three-year-old daughter Robin died of leukemia in 1953.

This was the sort of pedigree which, in the middle of the 20th century, made it almost impossible to fail in Republican politics. He had been at college with John Lindsay, future mayor of New York City; John Chafee, future governor of Rhode Island; and future Senator James Buckley and his brother William F., the godfather of modern American conservatism. His father had shared the Senate chamber with Robert Taft, Everett Dirksen, Leverett Saltonstall and Margaret Chase Smith. Yet his decision in 1948 to move south, to West Texas, out of the shadow of his family connections, prefigured his party’s relocation.

When Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992, it was, though no one yet knew it, the end of the line for WASPs at the head of the Republican Party. Although his son, George W. Bush, took the White House only eight years later, the younger President Bush, born in New Haven but raised in Texas, was a Southerner by fierce adoption. He turned to the United Methodist Church, managed the Texas Rangers and bought Prairie Chapel Ranch at Crawford in 1999 while governor of Texas.

The other major GOP figures before Donald Trump seized control of the party were not New England patricians. Bob Dole, an attorney and war hero from small-town Kansas. Newt Gingrich, an army brat who studied in Georgia then Louisiana. John McCain, irascible scion of a naval family who joked in 1982 “the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi” and made his home in Arizona. Mitt Romney, a Michigan-born Mormon private equity multimillionaire.

Now the party is in thrall to a man who oozes New York brashness from every pore. George H.W. Bush followed his instincts into public office because that was what was expected. When he was encouraged to talk about his long-term plans for America, he responded, “Oh, the vision thing.” It was not his forte. Donald Trump, whose party affiliation has changed at least five times, first mooted a run at the top job based on his ambition. In 1988, he remarked, “I believe that if I did run for president, I’d win.”

Political parties change or die. It is George H.W. Bush’s extraordinary longevity that makes the Republicans’ journey so vivid: He died in 2018, three weeks after the midterm elections of Trump’s presidency, at the age of 94. Only Jimmy Carter, 99, has lived longer among former presidents. It meant that Bush, the last WASP Republican president, was able to watch his era fade into history.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.